Post-pandemic teaching will ask us to focus on our classroom culture and how we connect with our students. Online learning culture is a specific culture found within the academic framework of higher education. Terms such as independent learning, self-efficacy, and self-identity are frequently associated with online learning culture. These terms align with individualistic cultural norms and the struggle of ethnically diverse learners who identify with communal cultural norms to find a place. Ethnic culture influences social and learning experiences (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Booker et al., 2016; Campbell, 2015). This article presents a model of cultural presence to be used in conjunction with the community of inquiry (CoI) framework in online spaces.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
